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The Impeachment of Mary Stuart and Other Papers Historical and Biographical
The Impeachment of Mary Stuart and Other Papers Historical and Biographical Author:John Skelton General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1876 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: MAEY STUART. THE INTRODUCTION. OF THE WRITING of books about Mary Stuart there is no end. A crowd of brilliant writers have expended upon her fascinating story astonishing industry and infinite ingenuity. Buchanan, Lesley, Goodall, Hume, Robertson, Laing, Whit- taker, Chalmers, the Tytlers, Walter Scott, Aytoun, Froude, Burton, Hosack, -- it is a literature in itself. It might well seem superfluous to add another stone to the cairn that has been raised to the memory of Mary. But it must be confessed that the industry of her apologists has in general been more obvious than their logic. They have collected an immense mass of most valuable facts, but they have hardly succeeded in bringing them into orderly relation to each other, or in ascertaining, in the scales of a scientific criticism, their comparative weight as bearing upon the question at issue. The bulk, too, of these apologies is something prodigious, -- the curtest defence of the Queen being seldom compressed into less than three or four volumes octavo. And besides all this, it must be admitted that the controversy has been conducted, on the one side as on the other, in a spirit of most unjudicial vehemence. " Raised in extremes, and in extremes decried, With oaths affirmed, with dying vows denied." Passionate partisans will not listen to reason, nor to the suggestion that a vi. a media may be found. Yet it appears to me to be as great a mistake, on the one hand, to invest Mary Stuart with the attributes of monstrous, unnatural, and detestable criminality, as to reduce her, on the other, to the insipidity of saintship. To the best of my b...« less